(last edited on September 20, 2014 at 3:59 pm)
I was trying to find my very first website, which would probably date back to 1995 or so, but alas…I can’t find a backup dating back from that time. If I have them, they’re probably still on QIC-80 tape or ZIP disks…ugh! I still have a couple 20MB SyQuest disks somewhere too, moldering away next to a pile of single-sided double-density 5.25″ Apple II diskettes. There are some old Apple II files I’m trying to get off those machines, but I’m too lazy to set up the null-modem serial transfer.
Anyway, my personal website’s original files were hosted on an SGI Indy running out of our Somerville, MA office back in 1994, if I recall correctly, served off our dedicated 128kbps DSL line. Speeeedy!
I did find the 1997 and 2000 versions of the sites that predated this one, though:
1998ish
After Qualia disbanded, I made a website to stick some of my artwork online as I went hunting for jobs. This was the site for a while…check out all the table-based design! I think there are a bunch of spacer GIFs in there too, back when David Siegel was in vogue.
I still have this site online actually, because it has an old portfolio that I occassionally enjoy looking at. I don’t show it much anymore because I don’t really do the game graphics anymore. But heck, if I met the right people, maybe I would take up DeluxePaint II again. There are actually some 2d sprites I’d like to incorporate into a game…I should just dump ’em into a Flash shell.
1999ish
For a while, some friends of mine and I ran a completely silly website called Slap The Bunny. My page had a bunch of odd anonymous drawings…the idea was that we should loosen up and have a good time with graphics again. It never did happen, but I still have this weird screen.
2000ish
As I started shifting from game design and production, I was thinking of upgrading my service offerings to be more, um, “professional”. This design never quite got off the ground, and I ended up just using placeholder screens for years without any content until September 2004, when I switched to using WordPress.
I guess I’m in a nostalgic mood, particularly as I contemplate the wisdom of doing a site redesign. It’s interesting to see the transition from the old graphics to what I’m doing now. In some ways, the graphics are quite similar in proportion and blockiness. What’s recent is the more refined sense of typography and color (though it’s still not that great). So what else is new? :-)
3 Comments
Check out the “Way Back Machine” for your site – http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.davidseah.com
Check out Microsoft too – quite amusing!
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Dave –
Having found your site only in the last 9 months or so, it is interesting to see some of your previous designs. And, quite interesting, to me, that your old site designs carried a bit of a “punch card” look to them, and now your very popular PCEO is based on scan-tron forms – which are punch cards on steroids.
I could probably try to make some deep connection there, but I’m still a bit groggy this morning.
Thanks for sharing!
Rory
Thanks for the suggestion, Katy! I didn’t have the davidseah.com domain back then, it was linked off our company site as a user account (qualia.com/~dseah), and it wasn’t in the archive. I must have this stuff archived on a really old disk somewhere. I am about to resurrect my ZIP drive and see if I can find anything on it.
Rory: interesting observation! I hadn’t noticed! I might tie it to a fascination with I/O devices: printers, scanners, anything that gets information into or out of a computer. The conversion of information from one form to another, perhaps, is related to something really deep too…thanks for the comment!